07.26.09

Rushdie: East, West

Posted in Life Betwixt Book Covers at 11:03 pm by Miracle ♪♫

“This permeation of the real world by the fictional is a symptom of the moral decay of our post-millennial culture. Heroes step down off cinema screens to marry members of the audience. Will there be no end to it? … There can be little doubt that a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already damaged reality, whose resources diminish by the day. After all, few of us would choose to travel in the opposite direction (though there are persuasive reports of an increase in such migrations latterly).”

“Most of us nowadays are sick.”

‘”Home’ has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails. There is so much to yearn for. There are so few rainbows any more. How hard can we expect even a pair of magic shoes to work? They promised to take us home, but are metaphors of homeliness comprehensible to them, are abstractions permissible? Are they literalists, or will they permit us to define the blessed word? Are we asking, hoping for, too much?”

“What price tolerance if the intolerant are not tolerated also?”

“…when the money has become no more than a way of keeping score, a thing happens which I am reluctant to admit: one becomes detached from the earth.
There is a loss of gravity, a reduction in weight, a floating in the capsule of the struggle. The ultimate goal crosses a delirious frontier. Its achievement and our own survival become – yes! – fictions.
And fictions, as I have come close to suggesting before, are dangerous.”

~ Excerpts from At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers

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Alright, I have heard about this writer’s excellence but I did not know he was this excellent. Not until today. I have been asked about reading his books but discounted him due to an unfounded notion that he was “evil” despite his string of prestigious awards. Laugh if you must. What can one expect from his knack for dark and enigmatic titles whose synopses I never bothered to inspect? Moreover, a girl like me with obsessive and instinctive tendencies for dissecting words would almost shudder at those two ominous words so much like his eyebrows merged in a surname: Rush, Die.

Let this be another occasion not only for acknowledging how prejudice and ignorance, even towards authors, can stunt a reader or a person’s cultivation, but let this also be an opportunity to remind us never to judge - um, excuse this modified cliché - a book by its cover nor its title or reviews, or the author’s name, until the contents have been examined first hand. (Nevertheless, let me remain partial to Twilight and Harry Potter and spare my shelf their shelf-space unworthiness without letting me read a single passage. =P)

With a suitably slim size perfect for little interludes from Proust, I was finally able to rub the dust off this ignored exotic gem; “The most original imagination writing,” claims Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer.

East, West by Salman Rushdie is an anthology of short stories categorized in three depictive segments labeled “East”, “West”, and finally, “East, West”, each being furnished with – oh! how ironic – inviting titles:

East

• Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies
• The Free Radio
• The Prophet’s Hair.

West

• Yorick
• At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers
• Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain Consummate their Relationship

East, West

• The Harmony of the Spheres
• Chekov and Zulu
• The Courter

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I shall refrain from describing each short story but I have posted Yorick at Scribd.com because this is the specific work that made me acknowledge the man’s genius and humour. With all the intertextualities and witticisms I would personally rank him with Günter Grass and Umberto Eco. You’ll see why.

Oh, Franz. I should have asked you to get me The Enchantress of Florence instead! Haha

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